Sine and cosine values are regularly used in, for example, signal processing applications. Typically, computations use a sine/cosine pair of values together, for example in digital down conversion or in rotational transformations of coordinates. Historically, sine and cosine values have been produced by using long latency instructions that either calculate or lookup the sine and cosine values. However, before the values may be looked up, the values must either first be packed in sine and cosine pairs in a lookup table or in two separate tables that are looked up in parallel. Unfortunately, producing both the sine and cosine value pairs using the above long latency instructions can consume tens to hundreds of cycles as well as use lookup tables that use a large amount of memory.
Mechanisms that can efficiently and quickly provide sine and cosine value pairs for instruction processing would be beneficial.